There is this spot on my balcony, outside my front door, that always smells like jasmine. It's the most incredible smell, most of the time. It greets me as I go to work, encouraging me to have a nice day. It welcomes me home after a long day of worrying about material, unimportant things. It was the deciding factor when I looked at the apartment, a sort of omen on how these next 10 months would go.

Tonight is different.

It's been raining for two days, a glorious pounding that proudly announces, "I am here! I am RAIN!" while at other times, it is a gentle mist, a caress that woos. I am wooed.

I stepped out of my front door, and did not smell the enticing jasmine, was not won over by the refreshment of rain. No. Someone has been smoking out here. Disgusting. Usually, I can't stand the smell.

Tonight is different, I tell you.

I closed my eyes, and smelled London. It was the exact smell on the doorstep of my hostel.

I don't know if it's because London is so rainy and wet and so much the same city as Austin. I don't know if it was because I was standing on a doorstep. I don't know if it's because all day I've been comparing the two, finding as much satisfaction here as I did in London.

Whatever it is, it brought back in a rush all the feelings and sensations of my time in London. It made me miss it, but it also brought a same sense of comfort.

In London, I felt brave, I felt as if I were actually taking steps in my own life, as if I were actually living it the way I wanted it to go, instead of passively accepting circumstances. I was creating my own circumstances.

And tonight, all of that was brought back, and I realized I can and am doing the same thing here. Nobody said I had to move to Austin; there was no real 'reason' behind it. I did it because I wanted it. I did it because I didn't want to do the easy thing. Because being brave is NOT easy, and I have been a coward my entire life. So enough of cowardice.

Life in a De-Constructed Reality

Tonight my mother was talking about her boss/co-worker, about how she says the most awful thing about her husband. How this woman, let's call her Sharon, talks TO her husband, how she talks ABOUT her husband. Let's call him Adam. He asks her if she wants to go out for dinner, and she turns it into a marital brawl. How could Adam possibly think she would WANT to waste 100 bucks, how could he think she would want to eat when she's already full? How dare he. What an awful husband.

Is anyone else enraged? Probably not--it's an all-too common scenario in America: an unhappy couple. We expect to be happy, probably because of what we see in the movies. And whenever life moves past our Happily Ever After and turns into the dullness of routine and easy familiarity breeds contempt, we assume things must not have been fated to work (wherever we got THAT idea from--Fate, not personal responsibility, controlling our life).

The most frustrating part of this, aside from our inability to live in our reality and not a constructed one, is that Sharon isn't really grateful for her status. Does she even KNOW how many women sit at home, ALONE? Doesn't she understand that SHE'S one of the lucky ones, to have found love at some point in her life? She won't sit at home every night, wondering why she wasn't enough, what was so wrong with her. No, instead, she yells. She vents every frustration from work, lets her menopausal hormones wreak havoc on something so fragile as Life and Love and their intertwining. Does she even remember how they met, how it felt to kiss him for the first time? Does she care about why she married him in the first place?

I hate to sound like an embittered, single woman. But in fact, I'm just getting pretty damn tired of everyone acting like Love isn't worth the time it took to spell. I want to believe that Love can conquer all things, that at the end of my life, I will be grateful for the time that my world wasn't broadcast in black and white, but in color, in sound. And not the Hollywood version of it all, but the real kind, where our sacrifices aren't the noisy bits, aren't the big productions but are instead the daily routines we endure for one another.